Wikipedia founder: “don’t cite”

Calling Wikipedia a "work in progress," the founder of the controversial " …

Earlier this month John Seigenthaler castigated Wikipedia for allowing a libelous biography of him to be posted anonymously. When the perpetrator was revealed, he claimed it was a hoax and that he believed Wikipedia to be a "gag site." This latest drama has added to the criticism of the site and its aims, and the site's founder, Jimmy Wales, has been out on the defensive lately, most recently in an interview with BusinessWeek. When it comes to the problems with certifying content as reliable, Wales has reiterated a common apologetic: don't cite encyclopedias.

No, I don't think people should cite it, and I don't think people should cite Britannica, either — the error rate there isn't very good. People shouldn't be citing encyclopedias in the first place. Wikipedia and other encyclopedias should be solid enough to give good, solid background information to inform your studies for a deeper level. And really, it's more reliable to read Wikipedia for background than to read random Web pages on the Internet.

With 2.5 billion page views per month, people are using Wikipedia, and many of them view it as a trustworthy resource. They are citing it, and Wikipedia even has a page listing some of its more famous uses as a citation.

It should be thought of as a work in progress — it's our intention to be Britannica or better quality, and our policies and everything are designed with that goal in mind. We don't reach that quality yet — we know that. We're a work in progress.

But can Wikipedia, as it is currently structured, ever be more than a work in progress? What does it even mean to be a "work in progress"?

Nature.com decided to conduct a small test to see how Wikipedia would fare against the Encyclopedia Britannica. Working from a statistically small sample of 42 randomly chosen science articles, the results show that the two are closer than many would assume. On average, Wikipedia had 33 percent more errors, with 162 "factual errors, omissions or misleading statements, " as compared to 123 for Britannica. In terms of egregious errors involving inaccurately explained concepts or misinterpretations of data, the experts found four instances in each of the two encyclopedias. Of course, what constitutes a major error is often in the eye of the beholder.

The most error-strewn article, that on Dmitry Mendeleev, co-creator of the periodic table, illustrates this. Michael Gordin, a science historian at Princeton University who wrote a 2004 book on Mendeleev, identified 19 errors in Wikipedia and 8 in Britannica. These range from minor mistakes, such as describing Mendeleev as the 14th child in his family when he was the 13th, to more significant inaccuracies. Wikipedia, for example, incorrectly describes how Mendeleev's work relates to that of British chemist John Dalton. "Who wrote this stuff?" asked another reviewer. "Do they bother to check with experts?"

Depending on your point of view, this is either a great win for Wikipedia, or proof that it is sub-standard as compared to Britannica. The fact of the matter is that with only 42 articles reviewed, there's not much to go on either way.

But the issue that started all of this has not been addressed: anonymous people with an axe to grind or a joke to pull can contaminate content. While you might find errors in Britannica, will you find outright lies fabricated out of nowhere? Hidden agendas? People pulling pranks? The cynic in me knows that Britannica can and will be accused of all sorts of historical infidelities, but I'm referring here to what Wikipedians commonly call vandalism. Controversial subjects such as Bill Gates, Muhammad, evolution, abortion and Iraq suffer from a barrage of attacks. I'm not surprised to see the article on Lipids be relatively sound, but as the Seigenthaler case showed, errors can be introduced, and they can languish there for half a year before anyone notices. Others are fixed within days if not hours, but it doesn't change the "roll the dice" feel that some topics have.

The real test of a resource is to be neutral and objective on the tough stuff. One can hope that Wikipedia's new policy of producing "stable versions" of articles that pass a certain level of review works out. Nevertheless, Wales and I agree on at least one thing: encylopedias shouldn't be cited in research papers, and are best thought of as launching-off places. But I still think that Wikipedia would do well to require accounts for all changes to its materials, and I'd even go so far as to argue that there should be a minimal waiting period before accounts go active. If information wants to be free, surely it can undergo at least a minimal ID check. It's no silver bullet, but online, there is no such thing.

Ken Fisher / Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation.